Ryan M. Patrick

The last few years, I’ve been writing a lot, but I’ve been all over the place.

It’s time to focus in and finally start publishing some of my stuff.

I’m doing two passes of The Martian Incident, one for content, one a line-by-line copy edit. After that, it’s off to the Pentagon for a security review while I spend some time (Lag Delay has been there for 9 months!) making sure it’s ready to publish. I have a temporary cover, but I’m not really satisfied with it, so I might go get a professional one made. Then, it’s to the self-publish realm.

Then, I’m going to do the same thing for Lag Delay. I want it publish-ready so that when the security review finishes I can put it out to the world. Both it and The Martian Incident are fine from a development perspective, they just need some heavy-duty line edits. Not sure if I’ll do another round of betas for either.

The Europan Deception…I’m not really sure what to do with it yet. It needs work, but I don’t feel like I’m in the right state to do it, and I want to outline the sequels a little better before I spend any serious amount of time working on it. I think I’ve got the 70-80% solution, but it might need a try-fail cycle and some plot threads modified or removed. To be determined.

I’m also currently drafting Crush Depth, the standalone sequel to Lag Delay. It is coming along nicely, just hit 11,000 words out of a planned 120,000. I’m throwing a ton of cool concepts and ideas at it, hopefully they all stick!

If all goes according to plan, I’ll have The Martian Incident and Lag Delay on Amazon KDP by the end of this year. We’ll see how it goes!

Now that I have something resembling a plan, I think I’ll start posting weekly updates on Crush Depth, as well as how my editing is coming along.